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<span><a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist"> Ajamu Baraka</a> -</span> 23 Mar 2022
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<div class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-field-image-caption gmail-field--type-string gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field--item">New York City protest, 2017. (Photo: Reuters)</div>
<div class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-body gmail-field--type-text-with-summary gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field--item"><p><em>The
U.S. justifies wars of aggression in the name of human rights. The term
has no meaning domestically either, as the people's needs are
subordinated to those of the ruling class.</em></p>
<p>Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers,
scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages,
eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the
dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the
“Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made
it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement
for years.</p>
<p>It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.</p>
<p>The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq
was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public
by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two
generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of
war.</p>
<p>In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be
undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful
reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling
class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been
effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war
sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!</p>
<p>Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that
essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine,
the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food
prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were
already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal
that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit
bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of
the capitalist crisis of 2008 - 2009, and the impact of covid by the
working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied
by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of
big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even
in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.</p>
<p>These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that
it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to
protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in
the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/china-turns-tables-us-says-human-rights-violations-worsened-2021-1683478" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">Chinese government<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>.</p>
<p>For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is
only being driven by politics, and it might be, just a cursory,
objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few
years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that
promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the <a href="https://blackallianceforpeace.com/resourcesonukraine" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">manufactured<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.</p>
<p><strong>The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis</strong></p>
<p>The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never
recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again
ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid.
On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are
experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the
continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs,
and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under
the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers
and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in
the cost of food.</p>
<p>Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic
human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human
rights practice separates fundamental human rights - such as the right
to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable
level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security -
from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights
responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to
be legitimate.</p>
<p>The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values
economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights,
exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human
rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger,
unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United
States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization
among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned
as violations of human rights.</p>
<p><strong>War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project. </strong></p>
<p>The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis
of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its
disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation,
culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further
white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement”
represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any
pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The
white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in
the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that
the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once
again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white
supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to
build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist
opposition in the North.</p>
<p>It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are
dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe,
known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national
bourgeoisies, are lining up behind their rulers to support the
capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be
completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition
continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to
resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align
themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the
colonial/capitalist project.</p>
<p>In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with
thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole
their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/podcasts/the-daily/afghanistan-economy-taliban.html?showTranscript=1" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">reversed, more<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>
people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during
the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the
loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in
rising food prices globally but in some places like <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/22/28-million-east-africa-risk-extreme-hunger-ukraine-crisis-reverberates" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">East Africa<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>, resulting in death from famine.</p>
<p>In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure
on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a
disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and
those furthest from whiteness.</p>
<p>The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives
claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers
represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better.
Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars
waged by the United States in this century have cost <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">$8 trillion<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> and counting, with another $<a href="https://static.wixstatic.com/ugd/fb6c59_59a295c780634ce88d077c391066db9a.pdf" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">8 trillion<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>
that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if
costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.</p>
<p>No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war
that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to
Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into
question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its
flunkey allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy
years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human
beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a
rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white
Europeans.</p>
<p>This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “<a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobmarley/war.html" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">War<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>”:</p>
<p>Until the philosophy</p>
<p>Which hold one race superior and another</p>
<p>Inferior</p>
<p>Is finally</p>
<p>And permanently</p>
<p>Discredited</p>
<p>And abandoned</p>
<p>Everywhere is war</p>
<p>Me say war</p>
<p><em><strong>Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black
Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the
Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the
U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National
Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the steering committee of the Black is
Back Coalition.</strong></em></p>
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